The Druid Way Made Easy

By Graeme Talboys

Graeme K Talboys has been Druid for a long time. An encounter with a spirit in a beech grove fifty years ago convinced him that the eye rarely sees all there is to see. A few years later he realised there were ways to discover more about those other worlds amongst the trees. The word Druid didn't drift into his consciousness until he was a teenager, but by then he was already exploring the Forest and fascinated by the history and archaeology of ancestral Celts. Since then, Graeme has been a teacher in schools and museums. He now writes, passing on what he has learned through fiction and non-fiction. He spent some time in a Druid Order, completing their formal training, but is much more comfortable exploring the Forest on his own. Since 2001 he has administered the Hedge Druid Network with fellow Druid, Julie White.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
• Release date: Jun 16, 2011
• ISBN: 9781846948879

Book preview

Forest.

Introduction

This book is about modern Druids; what they are, what they do, and what they believe. Most people will have heard of Druids, yet they are unlikely to know very much about them. There is a wealth of information about larger religions, but when it comes to the beliefs of smaller groups of people it is a different picture. Not only is there rarely enough information, there are also insufficient terms of reference to make study and understanding easy.

One of the problems with trying to understand Druids is that their beliefs and attitudes are not derived from a sacred text or the teachings of an individual. They have no central hierarchy and no fixed ideology. Instead, they look to the natural world with which they develop a deep material and spiritual bond.

This kind of relationship with the world is often called paganism, a name which throws up another set of problems in understanding Druids. Quite aside from the fact that some Druids are wary of identifying with paganism, it has been cast in a bad light for so long that many make false assumptions about it.

‘Pagan’ is often used as a pejorative to mean ‘uncivilized’ or ‘un-Christian’. Indeed, the Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) tend to teach that ‘pagan’ is synonymous with evil or the devil. Yet pagan belief systems are wholly separate from the Abrahamic religions and in many cases predate them.

The word ‘pagan’ derives from the Latin paganus, meaning ‘rural’, ‘villager’ and, to city-dwelling Romans, ‘yokel’. It is also related to pagus, meaning ‘village’ or ‘country district’. Roman soldiers were known to use paganus as a derogatory term for ‘civilian’. Some early Christians (who considered themselves as soldiers of Christ) used ‘pagan’ to refer to non-Christians, but this went out of use by the fourth century AD, re-emerging only in more recent times. From the fifth century onwards, ‘pagan’ seems to have been used in the modern sense of a person whose beliefs are associated with the spirit or deity of the natural world.

Paganism in its modern sense encompasses shamanistic, ecstatic, magical, polytheistic, and philosophic traditions. It tends to be nature-centred, venerates both female and male deistic principles, and considers the material and the spiritual to be inextricably linked and of equal importance. Honour, trust, responsibility, friendship, tolerance, and diversity are also key elements of its general structure.

It is based on a personal relationship with the world rather than on creeds and other affirmations of transcendent deity. Nature is taken as the visible manifestation of the transcendent, which is why a veneration of the natural world is a core expression of pagan belief. This is no crude worship of trees, stones, rivers, or hills. Rather, it is a recognition and reverencing of the divine in the material world, treating nature as sacred and using it as a model for understanding.

There are, of course, a number of other aspects of paganism that make it distinct from other traditions. Many pagans are animists; they see things as cyclical and are thus more inclined to believe in some form of reincarnation; and most practice some form of ritual or natural magic.

There are 300 million pagans in the world today. The pagan resurgence in modern Western society is, broadly speaking, a form of nature mysticism that has evolved out of a metaphysical stance very different from the prevailing materialism. Whether by coincidence or design, this ‘new’ metaphysic resembles that of people who were and are pagan. The impetus may be modern concerns (ecological awareness, feminism, politics, and so on) in search of a spiritual framework, but it represents a re-awakening of latent ways rather than an invention of new ones.

This revitalization has taken on a variety of forms, many without a specific tradition. Druids are those who are drawn to a particular view of the world, one derived from that of ancestral Celts. Of course, Druids today are not what Druids were two thousand or more years ago. No Druid pretends they are. Being Druid is not an academic exercise in historical role play; it is a deeply spiritual way of life. Druids use the name as an easy way of identifying themselves with the metaphysical and spiritual stance of ancestral Celts, a people who had no name for their beliefs and who probably did not think of them as a religion in the sense we now understand.

In recognition of this, ‘Druid Way’ is used throughout this book in preference to ‘Druidry’ as the latter implies a coherent set of beliefs that go by that name. There is no such set of beliefs, nor is it a name that ancestral Celts would have recognized because Druids were a great deal more than just a priestly caste. ‘Druid Way’ implies a route or path as well as the method by which it is travelled.

It would not be possible to explore in full the rich and varied forest that is the Druid Way in such a short book as this. What is offered is a basic map that shows the shape of the subject and which will allow you, should you so wish, to explore further without getting lost.

Part I

1

The Celts

Understanding the Druid of today means understanding the Druid of the past and the context in which they existed – Celtic society. There continues to be a lively debate about the nature of the Celtic world, both past and present. A great deal of shoddy research, coupled with poor argument has done little to clarify things. Happily there are also many sane voices concerned with developing and extending our understanding of the Celts.

Whilst it is true that there were recognizably similar forms of burial practice, ritual behaviour, settlement layouts, distinctive art styles, a group of closely related languages, common mythical themes, and similar social structures across a wide geographical area, this does not mean the Celts were a homogeneous group. There were wide variations through time as the culture evolved in response to internal and external pressures. There were